Driving day and night beyond Baikal

March 06 2013

Artem Zagorodnov

RBTH

Local pupils welcome us to Lesnoy Gorodok. Source: Artem Zagorodnov

RBTH's Artem Zagorodnov continues to share his off-road adventures during the Expedition Trophy race. This time he talks about the initiative undertaken by the “Our Alaska” team which takes reporters to visit a village school in Russia's Far East.

The
morning after our big party, I was informed I would be traveling the next leg
of the journey to Khabarovsk with the “Our Alaska” team. As it was very early,
I was too tired to react; I mumbled my hellos, climbed onto the giant mattress
occupying the back of their car and fell asleep almost immediately (I didn't
even notice the person next to me until we were racing across frozen Lake
Baikal).

The
drive across the frozen lake went off without a hitch and we were soon set on
our new targets and getting to know each other. In my jeep, everyone hailed
from St. Petersburg: Sergei is a professional photographer who had recently
completed a 14-month round-the-world journey on the world's largest sailboat,
the Sedov, while Nastya and Bogdan worked at a computer company.

The
other jeep was occupied by Daniel, also from St. Petersburg,
and Cheslov and Richard, two fellow driving enthusiasts from Poland. Both
Poles are engineers turned financial consultants with a strong command of the
Russian language and a love of its culture.

As
we continued driving day and night into Russia's Eastern regions bordering
Mongolia to the South and Manchuria to the East, I soon went back to completely
losing my sense of time, a problem that had been temporarily resolved during my
rest at Lake Baikal.

As mountains gradually gave way to endless plains, the
cities we drove through blurred into a single memory as the road signs went by:
Ulan Ude (featuring the world's largest head of Vladimir Lenin),
Petrovsk-Zabaykalskiy, Chita...

Source: Artem Zagorodnov

This
feeling was interrupted when daylight came and we focused on our next goal: To
gain points by visiting as many local rural schools as possible. “When you file
your story, you have to ask the organizers what the point of this activity
was,” quipped Sergei and we meandered from village to village east of the main
highway to interrupt busy classrooms. At each school, we had to ask the local
principals to provide an official stamp that we were there.

Like
Lemax, Our Alaska had failed to capture one of the space capsules in
Kazakhstan. They were also nowhere near as quick as some of the other teams
(Cosmos).

Our Alaska had declined to take the difficult route to
Khabarovsk--driving parallel to the Baikal-Amur Railway for extra points -
because their cars probably would not survive the journey. The team's only hope
was to get as many points for navigation as possible without wandering too far
away from the main roads. Hence the visit to rural schools.

I
read somewhere that politicians in Moscow had claimed that all Russian schools
already had access to fast Internet or they would in the very near future. In
either case, it's hard to imagine these promises reaching some of the places we
visited any time soon. Almost all of the villages had a population of less than
one thousand, hence we would go to the only school in town.

The buildings and
equipment had clearly seen better days, but provided a stark contrast to the
exuberance and curiosity of pupils and teachers at seeing guests suddenly drive
into town in jeeps on a journey from Murmansk.

In
the village of Cherimokhovo, we found the school all
but abandoned save one biology class. The startled teacher told us everyone had
gone home for lunch, then dismissed the class to guide us to the principal's
home to get that official stamp (the organizers would not accept video or any
other evidence of our being there as an alternative). The students didn't
complain.

We
now have to drive over a thousand miles to drive over the new highway
(Chita-Khabarovsk) going over Manchuria to Russia's Far East. Another long one
ahead...